I wish I had pictures of how dirty/muddy/cruddy my M4 was on several occasions...lol. I'll trust my life to my M4 any day without second thought.

Plus one on that. SeALs ROUTINELY take their M4's underwater and come out ready to rock with nothing more than a barrel cover and closed ejection port - and that's salt water, one of the more corrosive elements on the planet.

I always love the "The AR is such a high maintanence" posts - it always goes right to the root of the prejudice...

Look Kalashnikov's design is brilliantly simple, he was a tank mechanic for crying out loud, but his design isn't the end all beat all.

It fires a heavier round - but the round isn't more accurate, neither is the weapon.

You also have to figure in that civilians can load and shoot hollow points or ballistic tips in their AR's - something not allowed for the military under the Hague.

The import ammo business is going to get harder to pull off here shortly, so ammo is going to get more difficult to find. Until the Red Army invades, then the sh!t will be all over the battlefield.

Get one of both, that way no matter what force you go up against ( foreign of domestic ) you will be able to get ammo and parts off the battlefield...

Where do people get the idea that an AR rifle is hard to maintain and keep running in the elements.

I've put thousands and thousands of combined M855 ball, tracers, and blanks through my issue M4, and I have yet to experience a noteable malfunction (If I remember there was about 2 times that I had to run a SPORTS drill on it, and both of those times were with the blank rounds, which are crappy at best). All I did was periodically squirt some CLP on the bolt every 1500 rounds or so and it ran just fine.

Heck, my weapon has been so freakin dirty inside that I could literally scoop out the black gunk when I got around to giving it a clean up. There's nothing special about my M4 either. It's a standard, run of the mill, Colt made M4 rifle (generic issue).

BTW, this is during my unit exercises. We tend to eat up alot of ammo. For our next exercise we have around 50,000-70,000 rounds planned (tons of fun).

+1000 - This is the same experience me and many others have had. The whole "reliability" issue is complete BS, especially for AR-15's. The only time reliability becomes an issue is when you are using a full-auto or burst equipped M-16 or M-4. It's the cyclic rate that determines reliability, functionality, and how quickly the weapon is returned to the armorer. In real (civilian) life, reliability issues do not exist for AR-15's. My brother has had an original Colt since 1975 and has never cleaned the gas tube. The old adage "I can throw my AK in the mud and have it fire" just shows the mentality of the people that propogate reliability rumors....anyone that exposes their weapon to such conditions deserves to be shot with it...what comes to mind are images of drugged-up sub-humans wearing nikes and "fitty-cent" t-shirts in 3rd world countries like Somalia, holding AK-47's...I'll throw in my lot with the people wearing clean uniforms & carrying clean weapons everytime..ownership of an AR-15 presupposes a certain level of intelligence and respect for the weapon not commonly found in people who drag their weapons through the mud and sand...

__________________Guns Have Only Two Enemies-Rust and Politicians"The United States Constitution (c) 1791 - All Rights Reserved"If Guns Kill, Do Pencils Mis-spell Words?Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body - USMC"Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum"

Let me put a slightly different twist on the question. In light of today's political environment (future price/availability of ammo and parts), which would you recommend? I am leaning toward an AK (its reliability/ease-of-use, to me, outweighs any disadvantage in accuracy - but no need to argue that point)-but wouldn't want it if the ammo is significantly harder to find.

if that is the criteria: ar. i cant seem to get enough NON-corosive
7.62x39's. can get all of the 223's that i want however.

What's the problem with shooting corrosive ammo in an AK? Shooting match grade ammo won't make an inherently inaccurate rifle much better. It's fine as long as you thoroughly clean the gun after shooting, which most people do anyways.